Dragon Medical Practice Edition 4 has been out for about a month now and we have had a mixed array of performance from various clients so we decided to take our test workstation and document our benchmark speeds to reference if anyone is looking to replace workstation for Dragon and wants to know how they compare to others with respect to speed.
Our test workstation is a few years old and has modest specs as follows;
- Intel i5-4460 3.20GHZ Processor
- 8 GB RAM
- 128 GB SSD drive
- Windows 10 Pro
The workstation has had various software installed and removed and is by no means a “clean” install and we thought this would be a good real work benchmark test. There is no scientific research done for this, just testing some launch speeds for reference. Also note that we are using Windows Defender and no third party antivirus software.
Here are our launch times;
- Time to boot computer from power off – 25 seconds
- Time to get to Desktop after login – 5 seconds (includes PDCC auto launching)
- Copying Dragon.exe to PC for install – 2:11 (Note we do this as standard practice in case we need to reinstall)
- Dragon Medical Practice Edition 4 installation from scratch – 4:37
- Open Dragon, launch profile and ready for use – 16 seconds
We have had some installs take over 30 minutes, PDCC taking 1-2 minutes to load, Dragon taking 5-6 minutes to launch and we have found that Dragon doesn’t operate well on those workstation. We’re not saying you have to have the launch times we had but on our test workstation we have great response.
Note that probably the biggest thing you can do to “upgrade” your PC to work with Dragon is to install an SSD drive and install at least 8GB of RAM. It’s not that expensive ($125 CAD for 256GB SSD, $110.00 CAD for 8GB DDR4 RAM) and is seriously like night and day versus a mechanical drive.
If you have any questions, please contact us and let us know.
